Obamacare in the Dock

In order to settle a dispute among various federal courts of appeal in various circuits, the Supreme Court has taken up the question of the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act, known colloquially as "Obamacare." At the heart of the cases bearing on the issue the Supreme Court will decide is this point: is it constitutional, under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, for Congress to order American citizens, on pain of a fine or penalty, to purchase health insurance from private insurance companies in order to "spread the actuarial risk" and make the whole scheme work?

I think the first thing to realize is that "the law" bearing on the question does not matter. The Commerce Clause is sort of the Swiss Army Knife of Congressional power. It's been used to make sure lunch counters in Alabama are open to all races, it's been used to build the Interstate Highway System, it's been used for everything Congress wants to do. When Congress can't find clear authority for exercising its jurisdiction over something that looks kind of local, Congress sends in the Commerce Clause.

The Clause itself looks pretty innocuous: Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: " To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." So what does that mean? Well, it means pretty much what anyone wants it to mean. You might think that it would enable the federal government to do things that only affected trade or travel between states, and not matters that were purely within a single state, and that's certainly an innocent and understandable mistake to make, because the Clause does sort of read that way. But you see, unlettered legal scholar that you are, you are not seeing that things that go on within a single state can nevertheless have an "effect" on interstate commerce, and this gives the federal government license to do more, much more, than otherwise meets the eye.

Actually, the subject of national health care is so vast, so huge a component of American fiscal concerns (it's about 20% of total GDP, after all), that deciding whether it's a matter of "interstate commerce" is really a no-brainer. If it's not, then the hundreds of Mickey Mouse things the feds regulate under the guise of the Clause would surely go right out the window. So I would not expect the Supreme Court to spend a lot of time with the argument that issues of national health care are not within the purview of the Interstate Commerce Clause. I think that one's a gimme.

Leaving the truly contentious issue, the Achille's Heel of Obamacare: Can the federal government force you to buy a policy from Blue Shield, and levy a fine against you (empowering the IRS as its bill collector) if you don't cough up? While the issue will be presented to the Supremes in a couple of different ways, that's really the crux of the case. The anti-Obamacare faction has framed the question existentially, in a way: does the Commerce Clause cover a "non act?" That is to say, does the federal government have the right to regulate a person's "inaction" where buying health insurance is concerned? A person is sitting at home in suburban Chattanooga, tilted back in the Barcalounger, taking in the latest from Sean Hannity, not buying insurance. Can the federal government regulate that? It may sound like sophistry (most law is, after all), but a couple of key Circuit Court decisions have been decided on that very Sartre-sounding basis.

Obamacare is an ugly-ass contraption, a long, convoluted, windy, complicated, bureaucratic nightmare of a piece of legislation, exactly the kind of statutory Frankenstein we should expect from the coven of frauds and pretenders who infest the Capitol Building. Neither Obama nor Nancy Pelosi had the guts to really fix the totally broken health care system, and the Republicans, it goes without saying, would not fix health care even for their own dying mothers. As hostages to the fate of Obamacare, Congress threw in a couple of good ideas, forcing the insurance companies to take all comers without regard to preexisting conditions and outlawing the insurance industry's sociopathic practice of dropping insureds in the middle of life-and-death treatment because the insureds had the temerity to submit a claim for their Stage IV cancer. These provisions might stand even after the Supreme Court decision, but if the "mandate" to buy insurance is struck down as unconstitutional, then the whole edifice collapses in a Rube Goldberg pile of cogs, gears, springs, buckets, flywheels and probably hamsters, because those are usually found somewhere in a Rube Goldberg device.

To simplify the issue even more, all depends on Justice Kennedy, in his usual role as "swing vote." I think that Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Roberts would love to see Obama take it on the chin, and will probably find some incomprehensibly involved and complicated legal reason that the "mandate" must be struck down. I imagine Scalia will be the one to write this opinion if it is that majority. The liberals (the four judges other than Kennedy -- Breyer, Kamen, Ginsburg and Soto-Mayor) will probably vote to uphold it and will regard the essential argument against the mandate as a bit of existential silliness.

I don't really care, personally. There is nothing to love in Obamacare, and, as is increasingly obvious, I have tired of all huge nationalistic projects which are just simply too complicated, too unaccountable and too too-everything to provide any help to actual human beings. I would prefer to see a system where doctors must accept as legal tender, for any form of medical service from removing a wart to a quadruple bypass, the gift of a cow or pig or a bushel of tomatoes.

The Box, Thinking Outside Thereof

Despite frequent wailing and gnashing of teeth from conservative politicians, I don't think that Social Security and Medicare are really in immediate danger of any wholesale modification. It is true that the current charlatan and talented actor occupying the White House, Barack Obama, has proved more right wing than even most Republicans with respect to Social Security, since reports have it that he has always been willing to "compromise" on this granddaddy of all social welfare programs in the course of "budget" talks with Congress. But that's just Barack being Barack, since he always bends over backwards to please the Republican authority figures in his life (such as the ghost of Ronald Reagan, whom he venerates above all others). I don't think, however, the Republicans are going to take him up on it.

My reasons, naturally, are pretty cynical. Any sort of major curtailment of the two big entitlement programs would, in fairly short order, cause massive numbers of Baby Boomers, and the generation born within, say, ten years of the cutoff Boomer birth year (1964), to ask themselves a gnarly question: just what the hell is the federal government good for then?

The people in Congress, who have very good, well-compensated jobs, especially with respect to their actual skill levels in comparison to people in the country who are genuinely educated and talented, do not want the American voters ever to ask this question. If Medicare and Social Security become so attenuated that they are no longer interesting to the general public, then Congress (and Washington, D.C. generally) are only going to have one excuse for existing: keeping America "safe." Given the general public attitude about all of these nonsensical wars America keeps starting, maintaining, surging and never ending, that won't get the job done. Americans put up with the insanity of imperial wars and the crushing burden of the military-industrial complex because these seem to be the counterweight to the freebies the government hands out in the form of Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, welfare and unemployment. The "transfer payments" among these programs account currently for about 20% of total "income" of the American people; in other words, a full one-fifth of what appears to be "earnings" of the American commoner is actually just recycled money.

Not that the federal government can actually afford all this stuff. Let's look at the current numbers for the fiscal year 2012, which began on October 1, 2011. The first 5 months are now available (October through February) and they tell the usual story. Rounding off (which is reasonable, since much of the accounting is fake anyway), the feds have taken in about $900 billion and have spent $1.5 trillion. Taxes, in other words, continue to furnish about 60% of what the federal government actually spends, and it has been this way for about 5 years. This is not Obama's fault, although the Republicans, of course, try to blame it on him. The real "culprit" is the American economy: it doesn't produce enough to finance the federal government at its current cost, which continues at pre-crisis levels despite the obvious lack of wherewithal to do so.

The problem could be mitigated (but far from solved) by raising taxes on high income earners, but the oligopolic nature of American politics makes this a nonstarter: the wealthy owners of Congress, in other words, are not going to increase their subsistence payments to the commoners. With that 20% income figure noted above, and the 45 million Americans on food stamps, the rich feel as though they've done enough, especially when one considers that the top 20% of all taxpayers are already funding about 2/3rds of all income taxes. Neither party will cut defense for fear of being branded "soft on terror" by the other party, plus it is the MIC which offers the wealthy a return on their investment in the federal government.

It has become fairly obvious that all the new "jobs" being added to the American economy are not the sort of occupations which we traditionally thought of as "real" jobs in the bygone era of American prosperity. Rather, they tend to be temp service jobs which barely move the needle on government revenue and do nothing to improve the labor participation rate, which remains stuck at the same level as ten or fifteen years ago.

This is a picture of a completely dysfunctional system, economically and politically. The Media-Military-Industrial Complex continues to set the agenda concerning (a) what can be talked about and (b) how the issues can be framed, but increasingly this agenda has little or nothing to do with the well-being of the vast majority of American citizens. Since the citizenry cannot think cohesively (that is, as a political force) outside of this frame of reference, the creaky, unwieldy contraption staggers forward under its own momentum, and its fate will be determined by Reality rather than by conscious choice. The political operatives of the Republican and Democratic Parties, the well-connected corporations which benefit from government largesse (Wall Street, the defense industries), and the mass media which control the national conversations (cable news talking heads on Fox and MSNBC, the two big newspapers, TV networks and their Sunday talk shows) will continue to dominate all discourse. Thus, in the fall the American citizens will see their fate as being determined by whether they vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, and whether they check the box for a D or an R on the Senate and House ballots. None of these choices will have the slightest effect on the underlying problems described above.

I keep awaiting the visionary genius who can fully elucidate the interplay between human consciousness, electronic media and the anomie of modern life which produces this bizarre, stagnant impotence in the face of impending disaster, but the problem must be even bigger and more complicated than I can imagine, because no one has done it yet.

Democracy in a Complex Age

"However, during the 1850s, Know-Nothing supporters came out of the proverbial closet and formed the American Party. It championed restrictions on immigration, exclusion of the foreign-born from voting or holding public office and a 21-year residency requirement for citizenship. By 1855, 43 Congressmen were American Party members; in 1856, it backed Millard Fillmore for president, who secured nearly 1 million votes, a quarter of all votes cast. The growing battle over slavery led to its demise." David Rosen, "The New Know-Nothings."

I recently heard Eliot Spitzer, one of the more trenchant and perspicacious of the TV political talking heads (also a fearless and effective anti-corruption crusader who, for that very reason, had to be hounded from office so that Fraud As America's Business Model could proceed unimpeded), sum up the modern Republican Party as follows: The GOP is no longer a single, monolithic party representing country club members and pasty-white Commie baiters. Rather, it has degenerated into three separate factions.

The first phalanx remains the golf playing martini drinkers who are interested in politics to the extent it either (a) leaves them alone to make money or (b) channels public money into their business uses, and have no interest in government as a guarantor of social welfare. The second group is the Tea Party, a largely incoherent cohort with poorly-defined political goals who seem to want contradictory things, such as limited government with a strong military establishment dedicated to fighting endless wars. The third group is comprised of the theocrats, mostly Christian Evangelicals who want America returned to a simpler time when sex was suppressed, abortion illegal, marriage (and divorce) only between Christian men and Christian women and generally disfavor any intellectual developments in the modern world which have occurred after the Enlightenment, such as evolution, cosmology, paleontology or climate science.

Since these three tranches do not share common "ideological" ground, it is impossible for any one candidate in the GOP primaries to command a convincing majority, and this situation accounts for the difficulty Mitt the Vulture Capitalist has had in "closing the deal," as they say on the cable news networks.

In line with the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, Mr. Rosen's recall of the Know-Nothings of the 1850's is instructive. The name of the party was derived not so much from a love of ignorance and fondness for the usual scapegoating as from a feigned ignorance concerning domestic terrorism (blowing up synagogues, attacking minorities, the usual Klannish stuff) carried on by the more militant Know-Nothing cadres.

I can certainly sympathize, to a degree, with the plight of the Tea Party activists and even the Evangelical theocrats as they struggle to figure out what happened to America in its desuetude (roughly from 1973 to the present, the long decline after the post-war boom of 1946 to the first oil shocks). America, in a sense, got taken away from the Middle Class, and the thrashing and scapegoating, as in the mid-1800's as the Peculiar Institution which had given the South an economic advantage of free labor, came under attack. Now the entire country is under siege as the result of the globalization of labor and competition for increasingly scarce non-renewable natural resources, such as oil. It's not surprising that the usual scapegoats would emerge: illegal aliens, gays, and now Rick Santorum suggests that pornography has sapped the national vitality, much as flouride in an earlier age sapped our precious bodily fluids and left us vulnerable to the Red Menace.

Simple answers are appealing because it's nearly impossible to understand the true complexities of the modern political-economic reality in this country. To take one example, consider the question, dear to the Tea Party heart, of whether the Wall Street banks should or should not have been bailed out in 2008-09. Hank Paulson, a Republican, Treasury Secretary under Bush, and a Wall Street player from way back, claimed that "tanks would be in the streets" if the banks were not bailed out. In general the new Tea Party cadres in the Republican caucus in the House were opposed to bailouts and TARP, its acronymic symbol, which set up an intra-party schism (along the lines described by Eliot Spitzer). In retrospect, the TARP battle in the House was one of the early signs that the GOP was undergoing a fundamental change. I remember thinking (and writing) at the time that it seemed strange the Republicans would ever do anything which could be seen as anti-Big Business.

Meanwhile, many liberal Democrats were in favor of the bailouts, along with learned pundits like Paul Krugman and Democratic insiders like Tim Geithner, the incoming Treasury Secretary and former head of the New York Federal Reserve. Obama was for the bailouts (or appeared to be, it's always difficult to tell where he actually stands on anything), John McCain was for the bailouts.

Others, such as Nuriel Roubini of NYU and William Black of the University of Missouri, thought that certain of the big banks should be nationalized, their corporate suites cleaned out, and their assets taken into receivership. The concept of "moral hazard," that a bank which can run any sort of unconscionable risk can nevertheless have its losses "socialized" while retaining all the bonuses and ill-gotten gains (that is, from fraud), sets up a pattern of recurring irresponsibility.

The champions of bailouts, such as Krugman, cited dangers such as bank runs if the Too Big to Fails were allowed, after all, to fail, and a total freezing up of credit (which seems to have occurred anyway) and cascading business failures leading to a Depression; thus, the preference for maintaining the status quo and the same gang of bankster operators were left in charge, more monopolistic and rapacious than ever.

How does one resolve the issue? One thing is certain: it is not possible to run a controlled experiment on the economy in such a situation. The bailout advocates, such as Paulson and Geithner, can issue dire warnings and argue no other course was possible, but we really have no way of knowing. Yet among the Tea Party activists, this has become an article of faith, along with a very certain attitude that the Federal Reserve system should be dismantled and replaced with some fixed marker of currency value, such as gold.

We're fond of believing that democracy can work its way through any muddle, but it's very obvious that issues of this kind (and many other policy issues, such as the privatization of pension plans versus Social Security, or the nationalization of health care versus private medicine or ceding of issues of health care and pensions to the local level versus the national) are enormously complicated problems requiring exhaustive research and objective analysis to get anywhere near a clear understanding. And the public, meanwhile, is fairly certain that members of Congress do not approach such issues "exhaustively and objectively," but simply bend with the venal whims of corporate lobbyists.

In other words, there really isn't any way for this system to function democratically anymore, which is why the political process is the giant mess it has become. Everything has been reduced to slogans, bumper stickers, talking points and TV ads because, realistically speaking, a very small percentage of the voting populace has any realistic chance of understanding these complexities in an informed manner, and voting accordingly. Thus, one answer to Thomas Frank's telling question in What's the Matter with Kansas?, that is, why do the middle class people of the Great Plains vote against their own interest, is that they can't even figure out what their own interests are in such a complicated contraption as the American political system.

So Eliot Spitzer's tripartite analysis makes sense. The fat cats vote to keep taxes down (a simple issue), the Evangelicals vote in line with a 2,000 year old book full of old Hebrew wisdom, and the Tea Party people vote for any damn thing on the agenda as long as it sounds kind of angry and anti-Big Government, provided it's not the parts of Big Government they like.

And I really don't see any way this is going to change at all in the foreseeable future. It isn't that the system isn't functioning properly; it's at the point where it can't function at all.

Saturday Morning Essay: The Environmental Problem That Dares Not Speak Its Name

Brought to you by Mill Valley's La Coppa house blend.

As the result of writing a series of posts on Craig Dilborn's amazing Too Smart For Own Good, I drew the attention of the notable Prof. Dilborn himself, and the next thing you know I was on a mailing list of people in Europe and the U.S. who think a lot about the ecological predicament of mankind, write about it, and for some of whom it is even their day job. Including one of my intellectual heroes from way back, Herman Daly, the author of Steady State Economics, a seminal work if the word "seminal" has any meaning. I'm halfway to thinking I should almost take myself seriously, what with my readership suddenly doubled and whatnot, but I'll resist the temptation. It just wouldn't be me, you know?

Environmentalists tend to be a dour and surly lot, somewhat paradoxically perhaps, and I suppose that's because of the fundamentally discouraging nature of the enterprise. I would not accuse Henry David Thoreau of being a cockeyed optimist, for example. It begins with the recognition that, especially in a country like the United States, "environmentalism" is an "issue" that may or may not even come up during one of our quadrennial rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic. That is deeply weird. Another name for the so-called "environment" is Planet Earth, where we more or less have to live. How can it not be virtually the only thing we ever think about? What can be more fundamental than making sure the planet which sustains human and all other life remains ecologically viable?

Instead, we analyze "economics" as if it occurred in some sort of netherworld vacuum. Most of the mainstream economists of the popular press seem to analyze economics in this sterile way, simply comparing previous recessions or boom cycles to similar "patterns" in the distant past, paying no attention to issues such as: (a) the population in the United States is over twice what it was at the end of World War II; (b) the United States now is simply one of the economic "players" on the world stage, competing for dwindling nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs) with other big industrialized nations; (c) world population has doubled since the late 1960's, to its current 7 billion, in line with Paul Erlich's predictions in The Population Bomb, but we all know Erlich was "wrong" because the Green Revolution saved everyone from starvation so it's all good, except the Green Revolution allowed the world's population to increase to 7 billion, a level which cannot be sustained under any set of economic or ecological circumstances.

Yeah, that's the issue no one likes to talk about: overpopulation. It's a dicey topic. The human race, vis-a-vis the increasingly tired and depleted Mother Earth, is in a state of massive overshoot with respect to the Earth's real tolerance for modern Homo sapiens. Earth can handle maybe one to two billion of us on a sustainable basis, one where huge inputs of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides are not essential to keeping the yields of arable land at impossibly high levels forever, especially with steadily eroding soil, vanishing water, and an increasingly wobbly climate caused by mankind's enormous releases of CO2 into the atmosphere.

It just isn't going to work. There are things that can be done. I commend Lester Brown's "Plan B: 4.0," available on the internet, to you as a comprehensive treatment of how to get out of this mess in a humane and equitable manner. Mr. Brown's work is quite an opus, a very thoughtful analysis of ecological economics and what you might call the science of survival. My inclination is to side with those who try to imagine ways out of the predicament rather than to make an obsession out of pessimism. If nothing can be done, there will be plenty of time to suffer and tell everyone I told you so later on.

Of course, optimism isn't always easy when you live in a country, the largest polluter per capita on Earth, which features as one of two leading Republican candidates for president a guy who takes the position that maybe contraception ought to be criminalized. I'm trying to figure how an idea, in this day and age, could be farther out of whack than that, and I'm coming up empty. We are descended from ancient forebears who routinely practiced infanticide (the ultimate in late-term abortion) as a means of dealing with what they considered population problems of their own, and Rick Santorum (whose personal sexual psychology must be enormously messed up) doesn't think that condoms or birth control pills are a good idea.

Well, the epidemic of idiocy in the United States isn't all bad. We've trashed our economy to the point that our fossil fuel use, particularly gasoline, is way down. As mentioned before, it appears we might stupid our way into compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Let's take what we can get. It's the optimistic way.

An email to Dmitry Orlov on Mediated Reality

Greetings, Dmitry:

I think I was first introduced to your writing, thinking and speaking by James Kunstler on his Clusterfuck site, which of course is always an entertaining, usually hilarious take on the increasingly ridiculous nature of American society's "attempts" to come to terms with its fallen economic state. Jim combines the novelist/journalist's flair for the colorful turn of phrase with (what seems to me) a well-grounded analysis of the immediate problems presented by Peak Oil.

Your analyses (it also seems to me) are based on a more rigorous appreciation of the problems we face, and this is consistent with your background, education and training, as I understand them. I have especially appreciated your development of an alternative description of what happens after Peak Oil (at the global scale) is hit - that it cannot really proceed as a smooth descent mirroring the phase before Peak Oil, but is more of a calamitous, "step function" process. I think we're beginning to see some of these effects now, as the worldwide price of oil remains stubbornly high despite the rather dramatic fall-off in gasoline usage in the world's biggest customer, the United States. We're straining at the limits, and the bellicose developments in Iran are obviously connected to all of this, as the BRIC countries, on one hand, and Europe and the United States, on the other, try to control the situation and secure their market share.

Your more "subjective" takes on American culture are also frequently hilarious and insightful. In the C-Realm interview I heard you discuss, for the second time to my hearing, the exploitation by Facebook and other internet businesses of the American penchant for time-wasting, but in your usual thorough-going way you relate this to an underlying "existential" problem, which is that the artificial (built) physical environment (especially in "metroplex" America) has gotten so intolerably ugly to look at that it is simply a relief to escape into the pretty, glowing images on a computer, smart phone, iPad or television and be done with the reality "out there." If one possesses any sort of functioning aesthetic sensibility, this is pretty hard to argue with. I actually think that this single fact of modern existence explains almost everything that troubles our nation's youth - the extreme acting out (the school shootings, the bullying), the teen suicides, the despair. (I have a daughter who has grown up during this Ugly Phase, and the kids are quite aware they are living in a hideous, monotonous environment.)

Jim Kunstler (in "The Geography of Nowhere") quotes Lewis Mumford to the effect that one way to understand the years of Mutual Assured Destruction between the Soviet Union and the United States, how the constant threat of nuclear annihilation could even have been thinkable and "tolerable," is that Americans, hunkered down in their suburban tract homes, narcotized night after night by meaningless television, were simply indifferent to their fate. That's pretty funny even if it probably overstates things a little. But such ideas do remind me of a writer that my brother and I became very interested in back in the 1970's-early '80's named Jerry Mander, who wrote "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" (with "elimination" italicized in the title). Mander had been one of the partners in the legendary San Francisco advertising firm Mander & Gossage, who originated the "minimalist" style of advertising featured in the Volkwagen ads several decades ago, a real "breakthrough" in how ads were done (in effect, advertising making fun of itself, which is now widely imitated). One of his main points (and arguments) reminds me of the point you were making on the C-Realm interview: television presents what Mander called a "mediated reality" which stands in for (and between) a human being and the natural realm which lies outside the front door, and to the extent that we continually escape from the increasingly ugly physical realm into such mediated reality, we allow the trashing of the world to progress unopposed. To wit, why do we even need the "real" world? The "smart phone walk" which we now see humans execute on streets all over America is the latest, most extreme expression of this tendency: people hunched over their iPhones and Androids as they cross streets, walk into traffic, bump into other pedestrians, their eyes fixed not on the actual world but on the glowing images and text emanating from the Web.

Like Lewis Mumford's Nuke Fatalists, I watch these developments get completely out of hand (Mander of course was ignored - when my brother and I saw him give a free lecture in a small class room at San Francisco State decades ago, he would not allow videotaping of the talk - so how was anyone to know he existed or what he was saying? Yet more irony.). And I realize that wholesale change in culture and society, if it can be managed without utter chaos and violence, is not altogether a bad thing. I believe this underlies the increasing interest, and even enthusiasm, in America for the things you write about. You may live on a boat in Boston Harbor, in other words, but for that very reason, along with the deep and penetrating analysis you offer, I think your time has come.

Keep up the good work, please.

Bye Bye American Pie

I do not want to sound like the kid with the Magic Decoder Ring in overusing the insights from Craig Dilworth's Too Smart For Our Own Good, tempting as that might be. Nevertheless, there is something uniquely useful about employing basic, evolutionary principles when trying to understand something as complicated as the species Homo sapiens, of which I (and presumably you, since you're reading this) are members.

Thus, in trying to understand the long slide into degeneracy of the United States, the fading of its empire, and the eclipse of its Middle Class (that bastion of Good Living that thrived, for a time, in the 1950's and 1960's, the decades of my own consciousness-formation), I have been intrigued, and highly amused, by Dilworth's recapitulation of certain anthropological evidence that strongly suggests that human beings resisted the use of horticultural technology (farming, cultivation of the land for food) for quite some time after the basic techniques were known, preferring to remain in the hunter-gatherer mode even as this approach to living was straining against the ecological limits. To wit, for about thirty thousand years.

Now in truth, some anthropologists have noted that, quite in line with what Gary Taubes has written in Good Calories, Bad Calories (about the benefits of the Paleolithic Diet), that as soon as humans embarked on a grain and vegetable based diet, dental caries and other disease markers began showing up. Still, it was getting obvious that hunting and gathering, even at a point when there were only about 5 million humans worldwide, could not go on for everybody. As a general principle, once Homo sapiens is on the scene, the other species begin disappearing. (I can just hear the mammals who survive our 200,000 year Reign of Terror talking among themselves after we're gone: "Oh God, you mean you were alive during the humans!") Granted also that hunting and gathering are just intrinsically more fun, and much closer to the uses for which we actually evolved. This second point is closer to the truth, because the real reason that farming was resisted for so long was because it's just too much damn work, and humans prefer doing nothing whenever possible. Early humans finally capitulated to the sedentary, agrarian life style because they had no choice; it was the only way to feed the burgeoning population, to create a surplus that would get the swelling tribes through good years and bad and to substitute for all the plentiful game that humans had already succeeded in driving to extinction. (Sure, Rick Santorum: we're terrific Stewards.)

Bringing things up to date and applying this "insight" to modern America: it all depends on where you want to start the analysis, I think. Pretty convincing economic evidence suggests that American males topped out in their earning ability, in constant dollars, by the end of the 1960's. What has contributed since to the increase in household income (a misleading stat used interchangeably by economists who wish to confuse the issue of which of our two utterly useless political parties, the Dems or Repubs, are "better" for the economy) is that women have had to go to work, much as the species as a whole had to settle down into the utter drudgery of earning a living by the sweat of their brow, tilling the fields and harvesting the grain. In our highly-specialized, monotonous, Weberian organic society, we are apt to romanticize the agrarian life, a self-indulgence which my Southern farming forebears would no doubt find highly amusing. It's just a lot of hard, back-breaking work when it's done at the small scale which is actually sustainable. Not a whole lot different from mill work, which James Taylor wrote about:

Mill work ain't easy, mill work ain't hard,
Mill work it ain't nothin' but an awful boring job...

Given these insights, it is somewhat instructive to reconsider the disappearance of the American "manufacturing" base in favor of what was breathlessly described, in such glowing terms, as the "service" or even "information" economy as those fads took root in the 1980's and 1990's. While we have now settled into a national narrative where there are Bad Guys (the 1%) versus the newly-crowned Good Guys (99%), a narrative in which all the Commoners were simply hoodwinked, and sold out, and forced to the economic margin....et cetera, I wonder if the truth is somewhat less convenient and self-laudatory. Namely: who the hell really wanted all those awful boring jobs on the assembly line? Did we really want to be workers like those at the weirdly-named Foxconn in China who assemble all those Apple and other hi-tech gizmos, the workers who are restrained by suicide nets on the top floor of the building because their work drives them stark staring mad?

Admittedly, I have framed the question in a somewhat manipulative way. The point still remains that it is in fact possible to maintain a reasonably high standard of living in a globalized economy, one where energy use per capita is about one-half that of the United States, where engrained habits of thrift and use of public amenities such as trains, bicycles and walking predominate, where the great superfluities of sprawling suburban "countryside-imitating" housing tracts are not mindlessly indulged, where the personal automobile running on gasoline is not the only way to move from Point A to Point B to keep the economy moving. And for proof of this assertion I give you modern-day Germany. Germany does all these things and has a reasonably solid economy, with a higher GDP per capita, a higher standard of living, and a much higher availability of basic public amenities than the United States. It does all these things while still maintaining a manufacturing base (because it maintains a manufacturing base). Its exports create the surplus necessary to keep the internals going, and the Euro crisis is first and foremost about Germany's loss of its captive export market within the European Zone that is at the root of the hysteria over there. (I would bring up Denmark, but I don't want to rub it in.)

So we could have done it another way, but it would have required a different outlook on life, one that is not based on the self-destructive notion of "American Exceptionalism." Germans have maintained a work ethic which is more realistic than the American self-image, which is that we ought to be able to afford everything, live like royalty, while essentially mailing the economy in. When it became apparent that this approach was not going to work, that we as a nation were broke except for a handful of schemers and fraudsters (whom we tolerated, of course, and even idolized so long as the rest of us could enjoy la dolce vita too), we decided to switch the national narrative to a Manichean framework; to wit, we wuz robbed!

Oh please. We were completely complicit in our own destruction. Face it, if your house could make you rich, why the hell go to work? Work is awful. Let the house do it, let it finance everything, let it ka-ching! like an ATM for all those fancy SUVs and flat screen gizmos that fill to overflowing the American crapscape.

Americans, always ahead of whatever Zeitgeist curve is bending, are simply all too human. We're lazy about everything, lazy about how we eat, about our political civics (if Congress is filled to the brim with clowns, how did that happen?), about taking charge, about assuming leadership, about everything. And this is what happens when God kicks you in the butt and tells you you are being evicted from the Garden of Eden. See ya, and don't let the apple branch swat you in the ass on the way out.

Saturday Morning Essay: Timing the end of the human race for maximum electoral effectiveness

I recently attended a lecture by Avner Cohen, a senior fellow in nonproliferation studies at the Monterey Institute, who was visiting San Francisco to discuss his book, The Worst Kept Secret (about Israel's nuclear bomb arsenal) at the Jewish Library on Ellis Street. Cohen, an Israeli, was refreshingly realistic about the mega-hyped Iran-Israel-U.S. standoff. His essential point: everyone is bluffing: the Iranians about developing a nuclear weapon, the Israelis about launching a preemptive attack, the U.S. about virtually anything it says or does on the subject.

In the heat and noise about Iran & the Bomb, we often lose sight of the data point that it is the official, consensus opinion of America's spy agenices; the Iranians themselves; the IAEA (the watchdog agency in charge of compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty); many Israeli experts (including Avner Cohen, who is immersed in this stuff all the time), and generally anyone without a specific agenda to push, that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb. They are enriching uranium, as they are permitted to do under the terms of the Nonproliferation Treaty, but not to the 90%+ level (U-235 or fissile component) necessary to go kablooey.

At the same time, Avner Cohen hardly thinks that there is any kind of solution at hand, because there isn't one. If Israel launches a bombing attack against Iran's enrichment facilities, Cohen estimates that at the very outside such an attack might set back the Iranian program two years, and probably less than that. If Iran is permitted to proceed with enrichment unmolested, then it is probable they will, over time, acquire the means to enrich uranium to the 90% level, and enough Iranian nuclear scientists might survive the current spate of "mysterious deaths" (such as riding in cars which are approached by motorcyclists who attach magnetic bombs near the gas filler tube; hey, it could be a coincidence) to design and build an atomic bomb. It's neither particularly easy nor particularly difficult; you can Google the basic ideas for the two ways of bringing two subcritical masses of fissile material together (U-235 or plutonium) (implosion: Fat Man; gun-type: Little Boy).

Sadly, at this point in history, it's just a little too accessible to anyone, regardless of intentions. Thus, Stephen Hawking's idea that we ought to figure out a way to transport some human DNA to another planet, because he can't see us lasting another one thousand years on this one. Although my go-to comprehensive polymath thinker, Professor Craig Dilworth of Uppsala University in Sweden, author of Too Smart For Own Good, might find such an idea a self-defeating contradiction in terms. Writing about our ancient ancestors in the Upper Palaeozoic, living the good life (if they had only known it) with plentiful game, an unpolluted environment, lots of polymorphous, pre-Santorum sex, leisurely lifestyle, with only an occasional raid by cannibalistic fellow humans to harsh their dolce vita, he notes:

"As intimated in Chapter 4, you could say that we were from the beginning not biologically equipped as a species to handle developing technology, which our eradicating a huge proportion of the genera of the world's large animals when we were still in our hunter-gatherer stage makes clear. If technological development were truly an aid to the survival of the human species, it would not have led to the elimination of a significant part of the population's resource base...Something is wrong with technological development in the hands of humans - but then, you could say, something would be wrong with technological development in the 'hands' of any organism."

If this is true about clubs, stone-tipped javelins and lances, bows and arrows, which were sufficient in the hands of the early Sapiens to bring about the "overkill" of the mammoths and other Big Meat food sources, what do you say about 10-megaton hydrogen bombs? Are humans "biologically equipped" to handle those? I'm going to guess: No. I think it is such considerations which lead to the dour, tentative, perplexed way that people who know the facts about nuclear stand-offs, such as Avner Cohen, wind up talking about the problem. Cohen says, well, maybe there will be a successful revolution in Iran. Maybe negotiation could still bring about a solution. Maybe we can rely on the good sense of the leadership in Iran, who have no desire to see Tehran reduced to a large crater of fused glass. Maybe we can rely on President Obama to lead us out of the wilderness:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama warned that he is not bluffing about attacking Iran if it builds a nuclear weapon, but in an interview published Friday, Obama also warned U.S. ally Israel that a premature attack on Iran would do more harm than good.

A "premature attack." "More harm than good." And if we wait, it will do more good than harm? (I used to think that Obama's pronouncements made sense at least on the superficial level, but did not stand up to logical scrutiny; now I think he's abandoned even the patina of rationality.) Cohen thought the danger point, this year, was the period in the two months just before the American elections. With the American media pounding the drums for some more bombing, demanding some sort of payback for this dastardly plot in which Iranian agents worked with a Texas used car salesman who contracted with an FBI agent posing as a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the ambassador from Saudi Arabia a trusted ally which two former United States Senators have sworn in recent affidavits was probably involved in an operational way with the attacks of 9-11...hold on a minute, I need a breather here.

The point is, we need to bomb Iran. Avner Cohen may say it's futile, but that's not the key point. In September and October, the calls for bombing Iran are going to reach a crescendo, Avner said, and if the Israelis attack then, then Republican pressure on Obama to support the bombing raids is going to become overpowering. If the O Man wimps out, the booboisie of America are going to have their answer to the question: can Obama keep us safe? Or does he have the courage and good sense to throw American military might behind an action which could easily spiral out of control, involving the Chinese, Russians and Indians, who support Iran (and its oil supply), all nuclear-armed countries, in the valiant attempt to buy us that less-then-24-months of not having to think that maybe Iran is working on an atomic bomb?

So you can see what Obama means by "premature." He's telling Netanyahu not to bomb just before the November elections, thus forcing Obama's decision in a way which could foul up his reelection chances.

We've come a along way since the Cro-Magnons.

America's Desperate Struggle to Remain Obscenely Wealthy

I'm still working my way through Craig Dilworth's Too Smart For Our Own Good, a highly informative compendium of the world's ailments and their human causes. I particularly appreciate Prof. Dilworth's explanation of the evolutionary instincts which explain the intransigence of Homo sapiens when faced with what is obviously not working anymore.

One recurring concept is the idea of territoriality, which exists in both an individual form (where it plays out mainly in the sexual sphere) and the social mode, which in modern times takes the form of patriotism (scaling up the aboriginal idea of tribalism). These are extremely powerful, determinative influences on our thinking and behavior.

Dilworth's book made me rethink the rationale for the first Gulf War, for example, "Desert Storm." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thus posing a threat to our oil and, by extension, our "nonnegotiable" (in Dick Cheney's immortal description) lifestyle. It's not easy to convince several hundred thousand young men and women to lay their lives on the line to keep gasoline cheap at the pump. It doesn't have quite the nationalistic zing of stopping Hitler's conquest of the modern world, for example. This is where the concept of territoriality, in the disguise of "patriotism," fills in so admirably as a motivating force. If one tinpot dictator decided to overrun a neighboring kingdom operated by another set of burnoosed crooks and rule both sand piles, what is really the difference to us other than the economic consequences? And aren't the economic consequences solely and only the result of the elevation of the personal auto running on gasoline to a sort of God-given right in this country? Thus, it was necessary to invent myths about premature babies snatched from their incubators by Iraqi's heartless thugs and other tall tales as a cover story (or at least an accompanying narrative, since President George the First was actually pretty candid about what we were doing) in order to sell the war and play to the territorial instinct.

Dilworth cites some very interesting statistics. For example, of the Earth's 7 billion human beings, about half (3.5 billion) try to get by on less than two dollars a day, or $730 a year. The Third World exists primarily as a kind of plantation for the developed countries of the First World; the developed countries extract necessary minerals (oil, bauxite, iron ore, copper and many other things) from Africa, and poor Asian countries, "investing" in such countries in order to perform such extraction, and as a result the 25% of the total population living in the First World uses about 17 times as much energy per capita as the wretched of the Earth, and vastly more of the minerals extracted than do the countries where the stuff is found. This "investment" has inflated the economies of the poor countries and disrupted ancient tribal life, so that to get by millions and millions have moved to urban cities (such as Lagos, Nigeria) and taken up residence in shanty towns where they live out their brief life spans (life expectancy measured from birth is about 40 years in sub-Saharan Africa), dealing with epidemic malaria and HIV infections.

Back here at home, we compete on the "liberal-conservative" continuum by one-upping each other on symbolic gestures. For example, you drive a Prius while I drive a less efficient Ford, or you put your iMac in sleep mode while I, in my wastrel way, just leave the thing humming away. Because of the intensity of the territorial instinct, this sort of lunatic meaninglessness largely passes unnoticed in our conversations: we take our futile gestures seriously, and "liberal guilt" is largely about whether our personal lifestyle choices seem ethical enough, even if they are totally, completely irrelevant, measured on a real scale of effectiveness (the competition arising from the other form of personal territoriality, based on sexual instincts).

It is gratifying to see Dilworth praise the work of the "early" environmental thinkers and writers, such as Barry Commoner (The Closing Circle), E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful), the Club of Rome (Limits to Growth) and Paul Erlich (The Population Bomb). When the Earth's population was about 3.5 billion, Erlich predicted, a little over 37.5 years ago, that humans would double in number in about...37.5 years. Similarly, Commoner was writing in 1971 when carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were up about 6-7% higher than pre-Industrial Revolution levels (270 parts per million). Such CO2 levels now hover at 380 ppm, or an increase of about 41%. It isn't much comfort now to realize they told us so, and anyway, in this country (incredibly enough) we deal with our massive cognitive dissonance by simply denying that the greenhouse effect is real. Well, denial got us where we are today; why mess up a good thing?

It's not a point that Dilworth makes in exactly these terms, but one trend that I have noticed, in reflecting on America's "environmental movement," is that we have definitely accomplished some laudable things, such as (in particular) the Clean Air and Water Acts and the Endangered Species Act, all in the early 1970's. Such developments as the catalytic converter and improved fleet mileage have arisen from these movements, and Lake Erie is now less likely to catch fire spontaneously. However, when you think about it, one thing an honest observer might have to admit is that we never actually change anything which would...actually change anything. Not in real lifestyle terms, not in terms of the real "transactional business" (as Thoreau called it in Walden) betwen a human being and the planet which supports him. This is the key to seeing the effect of territoriality on our thinking. Many among us (the Christians foremost) pay lip service to the idea that "all men are brothers" et cetera, but no one gets hysterically excited enough about this laudable slogan to begin suggesting that maybe Americans should not use 17 times as much energy per capita as the poor use in Lagos or Mexico City or Manila. That would be really inconvenient, you know?

It is estimated that the grinding debt service performed by Third World governments to pay back the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as the result of corporate "investment" in Africa and other poor areas of the Third World (which allow Western corporations to cart away the mineral wealth while employing a fraction of the locals), subtract so much of the national wealth from such Third World countries that about 500,000 children die each year from lack of health care or sanitary water supplies. Oops: our bad. But you're obviously a Commie if you think this means that Chevron or Citibank shouldn't get paid.

Having hit a resource wall, with oil now over $100 a barrel, and the massive debts used to prolong a privileged lifestyle weighing on our prerogatives, we're getting pretty pissed off. How are we going to get the economy "growing" again, so it can resume that upward-sloping trend line to which Nature's God and the Laws of Nature entitle us? We don't want to wind up like a garbage scavenger in Lagos or a rag picker in Manila, do we? We're paying nearly five bucks a gallon for gasoline (about 2-1/2 times the daily subsistence of half the world's human beings). Is there someone we can go to war with and get this straightened out?

We are, indeed, a unique species. Brilliant, stupid, self-defeating, oblivious and suicidal all at the same time. I'm not sure, however, that the honeybees and cockroaches are going to miss us.

Vicious Circle Principle

I came across this gem from Rick Santorum recently while trying to mind my own business. In general, I try not to think about Rick Santorum; I don't see how anything good can come about by thinking about Santorum. He's clearly running for the wrong office; rather than president, he should compete in Vatican City for the job of Pope on a Pre-Vatican II platform. Anyway, here's Rick:

“What they have done? And I referred to it the other day and I got criticized by some of our, well, less-than-erudite members of the national press corps who have a difficulty understanding when you refer to someone’s ideology to the point where they elevate Earth, and they say that, well, men and humanity is just of a variety of different species on the Earth and should be treated no differently.”

He continued: “Whereas, we all know that man has a responsibility of stewards of the Earth, that we are good stewards and we have a responsibility to be good stewards. Why? Because unlike the Earth, we’re intelligent and we can actually manage things.”

Yes, I realize it's mostly gibberish; it's hard to follow what he means by referring to "men and humanity is just a variety of different species on the Earth," but perhaps this is no less articulate than the mean level of political discourse. I think Santorum is advancing a Dominionist view of the relationship between one primate, Homo Sapiens, with its complicated central nervous system, and the planet on which that species, for now, is forced to dwell.

It so happens I've been making my way through a very long book by Craig Dilworth, a polymath professor at Uppsala University in Sweden (I think Dilworth is from Canada, originally), who published Too Smart For Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind in late 2009. Mr. Dilworth does not agree with the thesis that humans "can actually manage things," and that it is this techno-grandiosity which will lead to our inevitable extinction, and in the not too distant future. (Yes, the possibility occurred to me that Prof. Dilworth might want to spend a lot more time in a Southern latitude and soak up some rays.)

Dilworth concedes that we are smart, of course, as mammals go. This is the root of our problem, as follows: Other species cannot really exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat, at least not for long. They die off when this happens, and fall back to a level which is sustainable, given the available resources and territory.

Humans, however, have created conditions which Dilworth calls the Vicious Circle Principle (VCP). This is actually the story of our "uniqueness." It's fairly easy to understand. When human populations surge, mankind solves the problem with technology. These technological fixes work (we're smart, after all), and not only allow the support of the existing population, but create a surplus which allows additional growth. For a while, a period of stasis is maintained until burgeoning population once again strains against the carrying capacity of human habitat. We then develop another technology fix, and the process is repeated.

As the technological fixes accumulate, they begin to interact with each other in unpredictable, and often dangerous, ways which are not appreciated by humans until problems begin to show up. For example, prior to the Green Revolution in agriculture, humans were straining to feed the world's population, leading to such books as Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb (widely attacked by Catholics of Santorum's Pre-Vatican II persuasion, for obvious reasons, since the godless Erlich was proposing birth control, of all things). The Green Revolution, involving the massive use of nitrogen inputs and fertilizers derived from petroleum, powered increased yields in basic crops, creating a surplus which allowed the Earth's population to increase from an inadvisable 3 billion in 1966 to a preposterously over-the-line 7 billion today. The Green Revolution also had the effect of draining the Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains through overuse, halving the original topsoil from 6 feet to 3 in America's breadbasket, and also of creating massive dead zones at the mouths of all major rivers (because of nitrogen and pesticide run-off from agriculture), thus heavily impacting another food source, marine life.

The Green Revolution permitted sustained population growth and encouraged the exploration for, and use of, unprecedented levels of fossil fuels. Burning such fuels released CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and, at the interface of the world's oceans and the air, enabled the formation of carbonic acid, which has had the effect of acidifying the oceans, destroying the lowest end of the marine food chain (phytoplankton and other creatures). Rising ocean temperature (an effect of global warming) has bleached out and destroyed much of the world's oceanic reefs, depriving marine life of habitat and food sources.

The physical layout of modern Western life (and increasingly in Asia and Latin America) has become heavily dependent on the private automobile, a technical fix which originally helped with the mechanization of agriculture and then enabled the swelling populations to live far from city centers and commute to specialized occupations, burning more fossil fuels, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere and disrupting the climate on which the Green Revolution also depends. All these people, spread out over such vast areas, required, long, inefficient transmission lines for electrical power, massive burning of coal to generate electricity, and the rest of the interactive infrastructure of modern life, all of which were devised in response to previous needs to cope with population growth and improve the "standard of life," and which all act in concert under the rules of the VCP.

The Earth's 7 billion people now find themselves up against what Dilworth considers an end point. Previous technical fixes, at lower levels of population, at least had the advantages of a functioning ecology and plentiful resources. Now, however, we have messed everything up so badly in such complicated, intertwined, inextricable ways (with so many complicated feedback loops involving so many poorly-understood physical processes), and we are now so short of such basic essentials as fresh water and high-density energy sources, and arable land, and reliable climate, and...well, you read the newspaper.

The idea being: we're really up against it. Rick Santorum actually looks like a guy who might have been a Steward on the "Love Boat" or maybe on an old Pan Am flight, but I don't think it's the national press which is "less than erudite." It's this dumb cluck Santorum and people who think as he does who present the clear and present danger to survival. Although that's essentially just a "bootless cry to mute Heaven," as the Bard says in the sonnet, an attempt to blame another idiot now, when the damage was done so long ago. We overshot the mark in the distant past, and if Santorum wants an education system which portrays the Flintstones as historical fiction, it won't make too much difference for present purposes. I think Dilworth is gloomy because he's right, and it appears we're going to be the first species that ever thought itself right out of existence.

The Obama Gambit

First of all, to state the obvious, if Barack Obama were the ordinary type of American President, that is, a white guy from a somewhat privileged background with a room temperature IQ and a sketchy resume (the apotheosis of such specimens being George W. Bush), we would never hear a word about "Birthers" or Kenyan ancestors or the rest of this racist nonsense. We all know this to be true; the rage, the intemperate screaming from people like Orly Taitz, the Queen of Birther Nation, would just never happen. Look at the old pictures (such as that above) of the intolerant Southerners who made the lives of African-Americans a living hell in the Jim Crow days; look at those faces, those masks of hatred and bigotry, that irrational madness that was Southern racism. That's what "Birtherism" is, all dressed up in its Neo-Fascist finery. The pretense of "protecting the Constitution" is a lot of happy horseshit; sadly these days, nobody really cares about the Constitution anymore, except for a few diehards like Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Turley and even, on my better days -- me.

Unfortunately, the list of those who don't care much about our Constitutional framework must also include Barack Obama himself. I have come around gradually to the idea that Mr. O, that preternaturally gifted political chameleon, has grokked in his pitch-perfect way that the current political consensus is that the Constitution can be safely bargained away, that the Bill of Rights is just a negotiable, political "issue," and that the Beltway doesn't have time in its mad scramble to raise campaign cash and line up lobbying jobs to worry about the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Amendments, to name just the most important and most serially-abused of the original charter.

Obama knows that he can get away with this approach. I imagine, in our debased civics culture, that the average Man on the Street is unaware of the content of the Bill of Rights; indeed, some studies have suggested that the majority of those interviewed, when not told of the origin of the rights being described, have found the first Ten Amendments vaguely "radical" or maybe even "Communist," and that there is little chance, starting from scratch, that we would enact the same set of basic civil liberties again.

I find that passing strange, but then - it's probably just me. So anyway, to return to the theme, the text for this Sunday morning sermon: I don't know exactly what I expected, but I was sort of hoping that Obama would not treat Constitutional rights, or the whole question of the impartial application of the rule of law to everyone, as just another politicized "issue" to be bargained away when convenient to do so, that he would not immediately succumb to this Look Forward, Not Backward mantra that he used to evade all difficult questions about looking into the obvious war crimes committed by the previous Administration, and all his other sell-outs.

But he did. He's got a big job, the biggest in the country, and with that job comes the responsibility to make tough decisions, decisions that might make it extremely uncomfortable, for example, to stand in group photos with "all the living Presidents" in the Oval Office on account of your Attorney General is busting your predecessor for multiple-count violations of the international Convention Against Torture and the War Crimes Act. Naturally, such a scenario is unthinkable when we reflect on the true nature of the ever-accommodating, always-compromising, go along to get along President, who is guided by one thing and one thing only, the effect of a given decision on his reelection chances. And then in his second term, the effect on his golf schedule.

Thus, Obama has taken his place in the gradual evolution of the American Presidency from the days when we had strong and resolute leaders, such as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR or Harry Truman, people who were willing to make hard decisions when the circumstances demanded them, to the modern version, where the office is really more a part of the Public Relations industry. The whole idea is to be vaguely inoffensive, to be lenient and to let everything slide, to never make a member of your powerful Peer Group in the least bit uncomfortable or inconvenienced. If we are offensive and violent, it's always at the expense of some completely overmatched Muslim country over there someplace that we bomb into the Stone Age while here at home we worry and fret primarily about whether Americans are exhibiting sufficient "demand" for consumer goods and services, in order to "get the economy moving again."

I don't think that's really unfair at all, as a characterization, as a description of Mr. Obama's modus decidendi. Thus, the question: how do you get excited about the reelection of Obama for a second term if you look at things that way? I'm continually amazed at the way liberal commentators in the media have gotten on the Obama bandwagon, people such as Randi Rhodes or Andrew Sullivan, who used to positively excoriate George W. Bush for doing things such as escalating the war in Iraq, or running a due process-free concentration camp on Cuba, and yet simply overlook the exact same offenses when committed by Mr. Obama, as he escalates the war in Afghanistan by a factor of three or refuses to shut down Guantanamo, for fear of looking "soft on terror." Or the easygoing acceptance by the same liberal pundits of assassination of American citizens on Presidential whim with no objective standards and no explanations.

The point being, if you continually adopt practices for the sake of looking "tough" and "realistic" that undercut basic American civil liberties, and establish the atmosphere of a police state, all in the proclaimed effort to "save" the American way of life from the evils of terrorism or whatever it is that we say we're doing, don't you eventually arrive at the point where there's nothing much left to protect? And shouldn't Obama be talking about that?

Thus, that is the central mystery to me of the Obama Gambit. Not the Kenyan grandfather. I don't care about the Kenyan grandfather, I am perfectly content to believe that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in August, 1961, an American citizen, as American as I am, as or more American than his Birther antagonists. That's all a ridiculous sideshow, a disguised form of saying that a black man should not hold what the Birthers regard as a white man's job. I just wish we had an American citizen, born in any state of the Union, of any color or mix of "races" (as mythical as the whole concept of "race" actually is in light of our common African Mother), who would stand up for American citizenship.

Gasoline Alley

Never content with only a superficial grasp of the superficial, I have continued to delve into this fascinating question presented by the New America, namely, whether Americans are continuing to have fun fun fun now that Daddy took your T-Bird away.

I presume that we are. I found the discussion of daily gasoline usage (assuming that gasoline deliveries to gas stations are a close proxy for actual usage, which I assume they are, given the "just in time" nature of gasoline deliveries, as with most inventory in Consumer America) on the Depressoblogs a little confusing. Since the arguments found in such places as "Of Two Minds" and Mish's site tend to goal seek in their explications (most Depressoblogs fall all over themselves to make sure that things are portrayed as badly as humanly possible), you have to go to original sources to double check. You know, if you want credibility, always my watchword. Which takes one to the site maintained by the Energy Information Administration, and although this is a federal government site, I trust it because the Department of Energy is headed up by Steven Chu, a brilliant man with great ideas who unfortunately works for the Obama Administration, one of the dullest and least innovative presidencies in the history of the Republic. One of my very first blogs talked about Dr. Chu's overview lecture of the way forward in alternative energy, delivered at a China-America symposium at Wheeler Hall on the Berkeley campus in 2006. Switch grass, not corn, should be the basis of the ethanol fuel industry, and he laid it all out, taking into account all of the usual arguments about energy invested versus energy returned, etc., and pointing out that switch grass has the huge advantages of being a kind of hardy weed which replenishes the soil as it dies back and requiring far less in the way of (petroleum based) inputs. Plus, unlike corn, it does not divert the food supply, and it grows in places where you probably would not think to grow anything else.

So of course with the Obama Administration we have never heard anything much about switch grass or cellulosic production of ethanol. Steven Chu is a kind of Nobel prop to stand in the background while Obama thunders on about an "energy independent" America, presumably by fracking the hell out of Pennsylvania and drawing up all that natural gas trapped in shale rock.

A slight digression. What I have found in looking at the gasoline usage figures (http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mgfupus2&f=m) is that gasoline usage, indeed, is declining. Rather than cherry pick data as the Depressos do, it's probably more reasonable to use a high point in a high-driving month (I'm looking at August, 2006, the height of the bubble years) and compare it to August, 2011. Converting the barrel figures to gallons (42 gallons per barrel), what I see is that usage has declined over these five years from about 40 million gallons per day to about 37 million gallons per day, or about an 8% drop. The usage has continued to fall since August, 2011, but this definitely supports the idea that there is a trend toward lower gasoline consumption, if not as dramatic as that produced by cherry-picking starting and ending points. I'm not sure at all how the Depressos came up with 40%, unless you started with the highest use ever and compared it to a current reading from the dead of winter, which is not a realistic way to compute the difference, and it also suggests that fuel efficiency is playing a much bigger role than that portrayed by the Gloom & Doom Industry.

The Depressos (this would include Zerohedge and numerous other websites which rejoice in America's imminent collapse) are mainly interested in using these trendlines to counter any argument that America is making any progress whatsoever toward emerging from the current depression. While I tend to agree with these sites that America has not really gotten anywhere (in a real sense, as opposed to papering over a busted nation with various money-conjuration tricks), I do think that this tendency toward accelerating conservation, deliberate or not, is a damn good development in the larger scheme of things.

And the news that makes it all even better is that apparently the decline in gasoline usage is matched by similar declines in electricity, natural gas and fuel oil consumption. The electricity drop-off is no doubt partly attributable to decisions by Americans across the country, under heavy financial pressure, to discontinue cable TV and high-speed internet and various other electricity-sucking gizmos. Also, to turn off the lights when you're not in the room. Whatever, it's worth remembering that Americans have been wanton, unconscionable, egregious (I need one more adjective)...unconscionable (it was so good the first time) wasters of energy, at levels much higher than actually necessary to maintain our standard of living, such as it now is. We tend to use about twice as much energy per capita as a country such as Germany, and if you've spent any time there, I trust you would agree that the American standard of living is not twice as high. Maybe half as good, would be more accurate.

It's all a move in the right direction, if you ask me. Maybe the next step would involve a cessation of the endless purchasing of unnecessary junk, which I surmise has to do with an attempt to distract ourselves from the environmental wasteland we've created around us. The world looks so pretty in those glowing, hi-def pictures on your iPad, but it would be better yet if the world actually looked that way in an unmediated way. You know, in Reality.

Why have Americans stopped driving?

It's not really a complaint, mind you; if people want to get off the road, it's okay with me. It does raise two questions, however: (1) What the hell's going on?; and (2) Why is it that the lamestream media never so much as mention the phenomenon?

First, the facts. The chart at right was crunched together by Mike Shedlock at his "Mish" econoblog, and graphically describes gasoline usage over three-month periods (Nov-Dec-Jan) over a historical period, which provides some useful context. The same data have been discussed at length by Charles Hugh Smith at his "Of Two Minds" blog. Both arrive at essentially the same conclusion: American gasoline use has fallen off a table in recent months.

If you had no idea this was going on, you shouldn't blame yourself. As HUGE a data point as this represents, it does not fit well into the current, election-year-driven happy talk about the economy, nor does it comport with the massively-falsified labor statistics promulgated each month by the Illusionist-in-Chief herself, Hilda Solis of the Department of Labor. Propaganda sites such as the New York Times do not want to touch this, because it raises disturbing questions such as, how are Americans actually getting to all these new jobs the economy is creating? So if American gasoline usage has fallen over 40% in a very brief period, well, it must have something to do with the (very mild) weather that has plagued the United States of late.

The chart demonstrates that Americans are currently purchasing about 33 million gallons of gasoline per day (the chart, to smooth the data, provides a moving average for three-month totals of daily usage; thus, 110 million divided by 3). At the height of the housing bubble, daily gasoline usage was closer to 56 million gallons per day; thus, current usage is about 58% of the zenith of happy motoring, or at about the same level as ten years ago. This is yet another symbol of our Back to the Future Reality: most economic data points, such as the total number of jobs in the economy, or the inflation-adjusted level of average income, or the inflation-adjusted value of the major American stock markets, all seem to confirm the same picture. Absolutely nothing has happened in the last decade other than a growth in population and a continuing decline in our standard of living.

Why are Americans keeping their 254 million cars and trucks parked? One surmise, I suppose, is that Americans might simply be living in them but lack the bucks to actually operate them. It is not, by the way, a matter of fuel efficiency. Hybrid technology and a move toward more fuel -efficient cars account for about 6% of the decline over the last 10 years. So the data really do point toward a dramatic diminution in actual gasoline used.

The good news is that America probably has brought itself into compliance with the Kyoto Protocols on global warming, bringing to mind the old tri-partite saying about greatness, updated here for environmentalism: Some societies are born environmentalist, some achieve environmentalism, and some have environmentalism thrust upon them. The United States would appear to belong in this third category.

Realistically speaking, the sharp drop in usage must reflect an abandonment of a great deal of discretionary driving. The price of gasoline (and note its extreme inflexibility - where's the old "law of supply and demand?") creeps into the unconscious mind of a cash-strapped society and people just quit driving. I think about the cost of driving now in ways I did not before. Take, for example, a staple experience of my distant youth, the round-trip drive to L.A. One would drive to L.A. instead of flying because it was seen as a practically "free" way to travel. Now those 900 miles, calculated at 30 miles per gallon and $4.00 for each gallon (out here on the Best Coast), set you back 120 big ones. Or, simply a drive into San Francisco for the day. Our local governmental districts do not want to share in the general economic downtrend, and since they hold monopoly power over all the "infrastructure," they have jacked bridge tolls and municipal parking to the moon and beyond. It costs six bucks to cross the Golden Gate Bridge (discussions are underway to raise it to probably ten bucks) and it's difficult to find a downtown parking garage where you can leave your car for two or three hours for less than ten dollars more. So a simple drive to SF (about 1.3 gallons of gas for me) costs in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty bucks, if I use a car (the costs of buses and ferries, of course, are better than that, but those fares have also been ratcheted up in recent years - another example of a "non-shared" sacrifice enjoyed only by the civilian populace). And all of that is before the cost of whatever I had in mind as an activity in San Francisco. If I'm going out to dinner, obviously I'm over the hundred dollar mark at this point.

The bottom line is that it costs a lot to move around. If one is among the 47 million or so Americans on food stamps, or among the millions and millions of long-term unemployed, blowing a couple of hundred bucks on a long drive, or simply on a jaunt into the Big City for the day, can become an unaffordable luxury. I think this is what is really going on. An expense you can do without, you do without.

I also think this is part of a more general phenomenon in this country, the development of a kind of Human Dark Matter, an unseen cohort of people who have fallen off the grid and into an Underworld where they are not countable, where their economic activity cannot be measured because it doesn't show up in government numbers, or tax revenue figures, or in the official labor statistics. What you might call, increasingly, Real America. I'm working on a post called "Five Fractals In Search of A Macro-Iteration," a delightfully unpretentious title, don't you think? And the gasoline usage figures are part of that picture.

Updated: The graph, with its two-sided scale, is not altogether clear, so here are similar data in haec verba from the Of Two Minds blog:

"Deliveries steadily rose to a peak of 67.1 MGD [million gallons/day] in July 1998, declined marginally in the 2001-2 recession and then surged to 66.8 MGD in August 2003. If we just look at one month--say November--then we see that deliveries remained in a remarkably consistent channel from 1994 to 2008, between 54 MGD and 63 MGD, with the higher numbers occuring in the "peak bubble years" of 1998 and 2003.

"In 2010, gasoline deliveries declined to the low 40s--literally falling off the charts. In November 1983, deliveries were 51.1 MGD; in November 2010, they were 42.8 MGD, and in November 2011 they were 30.9 MGD."

Louis C.K. & the Pointlessness of Civilization

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hzbV4YzH0R0

Tip o' the Hat to Guy McPherson and his Nature Bats Last blog for posting the hysterically funny Louis C.K. rant on civilization linked above. My daughter acquainted me with Louis and his "sitcom" series, which is a sort of postmodern update on existential themes featured in Seinfeld, in the sense that both series concern Absurdity, the alienation of modern life and the elaboration of the pointless dramas we create in order to distract ourselves from the fact of our mortality (and all such modern cinematic themes, in America at least, originate with the great Woody Allen).

Louis is discussing, from another angle, the concept of the "organic society" mentioned here a few posts back; civilization is built on specialization and the creation of a societal machine comprised of interrelated parts (called "jobs," including call centers which focus on making sure you're deriving maximum enjoyment from your World At War video game, as Louis suggests) which provides a "living" for modern human beings. We forget, almost always, that this way of approaching human life is not an inevitable choice (there is nothing in human evolution which compels the organization of human life along these lines), but is simply the outcome of cognitive decisions, enforced now by modern industrial culture. In many ways, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out, and as Louis C.K. in a very funny way describes, this specialization leads to a preposterously constricted, dull and unsatisfying life for the vast majority of its human participants. And it has led, among its other drawbacks, to environmental disaster and the prospect of near-term extinction through either global warming or nuclear holocaust.

I think I can answer the question Louis poses concerning the very real hostility of Evangelical Christianity to environmentalism in general and to climate change arguments in particular. In the superstitious world of Apocalyptic religion, extinction events are the exclusive province of the supreme beings. No matter how large a trash pile we create on what the Christians call "God's Creation," it's okay because this life doesn't really count anyway. Thus, it is presumptuous and probably sacrilegious to contemplate puny Man's ability to bring about his own extinction; the Christians are wrong, of course, because species become extinct all the time (the average life being about 200,000 years, accelerating now because of the cesspool humans have made of the world), and homo sapiens will prove no different. Our assumption is that the "lesser mammals" lack a sufficiently complex central nervous system for misuse in the creation of religious mythologies; that would appear to be the only distinction.

I think Louis presents a genuine insight into the nature of human cities. They are themselves concentrated areas of pollution and litter, and it is counterproductive to insist on their "cleanliness" since this simply potentiates the externalization of their trash into the broader civilization. We are talking only of a certain fussy "aesthetics," and yet, as Louis points out (very subtly), cities are already very alien, inhuman places, with their smoothed (paved) surfaces and rectilinear construction of tall buildings and streets laid out on a grid. These features are what give cities such a nightmarish, alienating feeling, an "inhuman" feeling, captured best, perhaps, by the German Expressionist painters and the American artists they influenced, such as Edward Hopper (I'm thinking particularly of "Night Hawks" .)

One takes one's Sunday morning sermons where one finds them, I suppose, and a Big Up to Reverend Louis.

Saturday Morning Essay: Michael Hastings & "The Operators"

Brought to you by Peet's Coffee, as always.

I'm finishing up a very good read, The Operators, by Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer who achieved quite a media buzz a couple of years ago when his disclosures of "off the cuff" remarks by General Stanley McChrystal, who was then the commanding officer in Afghanistan, caused the sacking of McChrystal by an embarrassed White House. Hastings is a good, lively writer in the Hunter S. Thompson/Matt Taiibi mode, and had the courage to exercise the license he was apparently given by McChrystal's entourage to write his story any way he saw fit. The way he saw fit was simply to reproduce the scenes in Afghanistan, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in which McChrystal and his "Team America," a rowdy, hard-drinking, profane staff of somewhat iconoclastic career Army guys spoke at length about what they thought about Obama, Hamid Karzai (the President of Afghanistan, elected under very dubious conditions), Gen. James Jones, the National Security head (called a "clown" by Team America), the various ambassadors and envoys to Afghanistan, such as Holbrooke and Eikenberry, and the counterproductive nature of the war in general. Indeed, some commentators thought this was the real reason McChrystal had to go, his "counterinsurgency math," by which he calculated that every innocent civilian killed in Afghanistan produced ten more insurgents against America and Karzai. Obviously, President Obama can't have that kind of logical deduction, coming from his own theater commander, on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Hastings probably seemed like a tame mascot and Boswell to McChrystal's Dr. Johnson, but in fact Hastings has a keen mind and deep powers of observation and analysis, which proved McChrystal's undoing. McChrystal himself is an interesting subject, a liberal Democrat by inclination who is nevertheless a supremely ambitious careerist; it's just that his career is in the Special Ops section of the Army, and counterinsurgency in particular. Tall, gaunt, ascetic when he's in the combat theater, and a two-fisted drinker when he hits the bars in France and Berlin, McChrystal is a hard guy to pin down. He inspired intense loyalty among his Team America entourage, was considered enlightened and innovative in his approach to Afghanistan, yet he was involved in both the Pat Tillman and Abu Ghraib scandals

One scene stuck with me. In Berlin in 2009, McChrystal gave a lecture on Afghanistan to a group of German media figures. In the account given by Hastings, the lecture was a tour de force, an historical exposition of Afghanistan's thirty years of constant war, and in a country where about two-thirds of the population is younger than 25 (life expectancy in Afghanistan is 44), this fact alone means that the vast majority of Afghans have never experienced peace during their lifetimes. McChrystal described the tribalism, the drug trade, the corruption in the central government, the nature of the insurgency, the Taliban, everything. At the end of the lecture, one German reporter asked McChrystal a question that stunned Hastings; the reporter pointed out that McChrystal had mentioned Al-Qaeda only once.

This is a question, as Hastings notes, that an American reporter would never ask, nor probably even think to ask. Yet this is the putative reason we invaded in 2001, over ten years ago. What is somewhat reassuring to one's sanity (and to the reliability of one's own perceptions) is that Hastings, who had the privilege of an insider's perspective on the top command in Afghanistan (and was allowed to write about it), winds up asking the same common sense questions that occur to everyday Americans. Such as: why do terrorists, Al-Qaeda or otherwise, actually need a "safe haven" from which to plan attacks on America? Especially when one considers, as confirmed by the Report of the 9-11 Commission (which, I repeat, apparently no one has read, in or out of government), that the 9-11 plot was actually put together in Hamburg, Germany, Cairo, South Florida and Phoenix? Why is Afghanistan, the sixth poorest country in the world with a population of 30 million, with no real military capability and no nuclear weapons, actually any sort of threat to the United States?

The answers to these questions are obvious, and Hastings provides a valuable public service in lifting the veil on all the nonsensical propaganda which Obama and others use to justify this "necessary war." It isn't necessary at all, it's counter-productive, and it is carried on for two principal reasons:

1. As a money-making venture for the military-industrial complex, and for all the lobbyists the MIC supports (who in turn support their employees in the Congress and White House).

2. As a theater of operations where Army commanders can advance their career ambitions by participating in an actual war, sort of. It's a war in the sense that lots of people, Americans and especially Afghans, die violent deaths.

One could add that Afghanistan is also a political meme. By being for this war (again, sort of), President Obama can be Presidential and tough on terror. The war has no connection to American security, in reality, or even to the "war on terror" (whatever that is), as even Team America would probably concede; indeed, the book cites official studies by the Rand Corporation (best read with one's Dr. Strangelove voice) and by the CIA which demonstrate convincingly that combating terrorism with the ordinary criminal justice system is more effective than launching wars against countries that supposedly "harbor" terrorists. But the meta-reality of Media Discourse, a stupid and dumb beast, in which the Afghanistan war has a totemic or emblematic essence connected to America's righteous revenge for the outrage of 9-11, is the one that is debated on the campaign trail and among the regular toadies of the press (excluding guys like Hastings and Taiibi).

Why did we invade Afghanistan? That's a question that first occurred to me in the fall of 2001. Now Hastings has written a book which sheds a lot of light on that question. The impulse to invade (as an act of misplaced or impotent revenge) is probably distinct from the institutional reasons that have kept the war going for a period nearly three times as long as America's involvement in World War II (3 years, 8 months, versus 10 years, 3 months), but it still adds up to complete nonsense. I suspect that the answer, at bottom, is that we fight many wars because we have a huge military establishment that wants something to do and wants to justify its existence and all the careers attendant to it. You can't give those answers as the official rationale, so we torture logic to create propaganda that sustains these misbegotten adventures.